Sony finally responds to controversy over ‘No Man’s Sky’

Following the release of the highly anticipated space-exploration game “No Man’s Sky,” there was a bit of a backlash amongst its most excited customers.

In short, they felt its marketing campaign greatly overpromised on the game’s features, leaving many feeling underwhelmed once they actually started playing.

A YouTube video that made the rounds shortly after the game’s release sums up the disappointment pretty well. In it, you can see footage from the game’s initial reveal at E3 2014 compared to actual gameplay footage upon its release in August:

Speaking to Eurogamer, Sony’s President of Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, said he sympathizes with these disappointed customers.

“I understand some of the criticisms especially [Hello Games’ Founder] Sean Murray is getting, because he sounded like he was promising more features in the game from day one,” he said. “It wasn’t a great PR strategy, because he didn’t have a PR person helping him, and in the end he is an indie developer. But he says their plan is to continue to develop No Man’s Sky features and such, and I’m looking forward to continuing to play the game.”

One of the features players felt they were promised was the ability to play with others online should they ever run into each other. During Sean Murray’s appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” he says that this would be possible, but very unlikely given just how unfathomably huge the game’s world is.

Murray says the game’s universe is as big as an actual universe, containing an estimated 18 quintillion planets.

While that may be the case, two players managed to stand in the exact same spot on the exact same planet less than a day after the game came out – but they were unable to see each other.

Sean Murray, clearly surprised that players had managed to run into each other so soon, chalked this up to the fact that the servers were overwhelmed with so many trying to play the game at once, but others speculated that maybe the game wasn’t able to support multiplayer at all.

We hope to see those happening… but too many of you are playing right now. More than we could have predicted

Unfortunately, this isn’t a new issue for the gaming industry. There’s a great YouTube video that showcases the differences between the initial reveal trailers for games versus what they actually looked like upon release.

Let’s just hope Sean Murray makes good on his promise of continuing to support “No Man’s Sky,” evolving it into the game that its most loyal fans dreamed it would be from the start.